HOME | ABOUT | FICTION | INTERVIEWS | FEATURES | REVIEWS | NEWS | BUY THE PRINT MAGAZINE | BACK ISSUES | LINKS | CONTACT US

Bluebottle
James Sallis
No Exit paperback, 154 pages, £6.99
Published March 1999
ISBN 1901982068
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)

‘I was trying to read a book but the damned thing kept talking to me, interrupting. Don’t turn this page, it would say. Or: You don’t have any idea what this is all about, where I’m going with this, do you.’

It’s not the first time Lew Griffin has left a New Orleans bar with a white woman, nor the first time the pair have been shot at. Only, in Black Hornet it was she who was hit; hit, killed. And Lew who got to delve into the city’s radical racial politics in his hunt for the shooter. And now it’s him. The fragmentary and disturbing Bluebottle opens with Lew rushed to the ER and his subsequent recovery, both from injuries sustained and sudden, hysterical blindness.

Fifth in the extraordinary Lew Griffin series, Bluebottle plays itself out like a distillation of the previous two entries. There are the race politics, the shooter, the relative plotiness of Black Hornet, but fastened to the back of the hallucinatory free association that made Eye Of The Cricket such a strange, beguiling read. Throughout the five books Lew returns again and again to events through experience, through memory, through his own life as a writer. It’s no surprise, therefore, that he should revisit the shooting, but the tendrils that extend from its impact reverse what we think we already know. 

Bluebottle unfolds a series of possible plots - the shooting, a missing low-rent author, a local gang of white-supremacists (contrast: the Black Muslims of Black Hornet) - but is never their hostage. It’s a finely-patterned piece, rich in allusion and emotional scar tissue.

Sallis’ achievement over the sequence (there may be one final book, he says) has been to dislocate his audience, to set us adrift in time. They are marketed as hard-boiled crime, but only because Sallis is alive to the commercial necessities of genre; the Lew Griffin novels surely hark back more to his early career in science fiction. These are books not of landscape but of the mind; it is hard to think of another contemporary writer who has so brilliantly captured the shifting sand that is memory. Like thought, moments - impressions of moments - bleed through into each Griffin book from its siblings: ‘I’d been Doo-Wopped. Every day was today. I was on Hopi Mean Time.’ There is something scary about Bluebottle that isn’t there in the other books: its world is part Chester Himes, part David Lynch. To journey into this narrative is to journey on a map with the names erased. •

You can read an excerpt from Bluebottle here.